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Media Composer and a Portable Drive
Forgive me if this has been answered previously – I searched and couldn’t find an answer that was recent. I will say up front that I am new to the Avid Media Composer world, so please be gentle!
I have (newly purchased and installed) Media Composer on my desktop, and laptop (Mountain Lion). I am using Application Manager to activate or deactivate the license for use on one when I’m away from the other. I just bought a Thunderbolt drive to use as a portable media drive, and want to know the best way to set it up so that I can easily edit projects from either system. I’m willing to set up the portable drive as my only media drive. Would that be the easiest solution? How is everyone else handling this type of scenario?
Thanks in advance!
Bill
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3 Replies
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This is a very common scenario. Just move the drive between systems, and everything will reconnect fine. Avid has a VERY SPECIFIC file structure that it creates when you capture or import video. Don’t mess with that, and Avid will always see the media, no matter what computer it is connected with.
The file structure is this: On the root level of the drive, Avid makes a folder called Avid MediaFiles…inside there is a folder called “MXF”…and in there are numbered folders, starting with “1” and going to “2” if “1” has more than 5000 files….and so on. You might also have an OMFI MediaFiles folder. Leave that file structure alone and you are good to go.
Shane
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Thanks Shane! Exactly what I wanted to know!
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Also, go into your settings in the project on each system and go to Media Creation. Set all items to put the media on the external drive. You can also check filter out system drive and filter out launch drive (I think that’s what they call it) so that it won’t go to the internal hard drive.
Now all your renders and motion effects you create will be written to the external drive so you won’t have those offline if you switch systems.
And even though Avid should create a new media folder when there are 5,000 items in the current one, it is recommended to keep that number at around 1200. So keep an eye on it, and when the folder inside the MXF named xxx.1 gets to 1200-1500, lock it off by changing the .1 to .2 and then Avid will create the new .1 folder the next time media is written. If you have recently rendered or imported anything make sure the two nonmedia files, the database ones (can’t remember the extensions offhand) are of a newer time than the media files so that they have all the media files indexed or the newest ones might appear offline.
If you do get an OMFI media folder, iirc, the current folder has no .#, so put a .1 at the end and then Avid will create the new folder when you create more media.
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